A couple of days ago a research team comprised of faculty at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, the University of Southampton in the UK, and IQFR-CSIC in Madrid, Spain published a paper containing a creative solution to a problem known to be NP-complete, namely a version of the traveling salesman problem. The TSP, in summary, postulates a scenario in which you have an arbitrary number of towns spread over a large area and an arbitrary number of paths connecting them. What is the shortest possible path one can take in which the traveler visits each town only once and returns …
Part of every traveler's threat model today should include the following scenario:
When you're trying to fly into or out of an airport en route to someplace else, it is entirely possible that the airport's security staff will take you aside for a more thorough search and questioning while your stuff is taken someplace out of your control and analyzed. We know that there are malware packages available today that boobytrap the boot device of laptop computers to install various forms of surveillance malware which run the next time you start your machine up and compromise the OS even though …
Let's cut through some FUD: Human stem cells are pretty easy to come by. Embryos have not been involved in the process for well over ten years that I can recall off the top of my head, and probably closer to twenty. Every human body has stockpiles of them that can be extracted with minor surgical procedures. The procedures in question usually involves scarily long needles that reach deeply enough inside the body to extract them, which might be why research into re-embryonization of other kinds of cells has proceeded at a good clip. To summarize, medical science has been …
I don't have a whole lot of time right now, but this came to me via several channels that I trust. Robert Mathis-Friedman suffered a massive stroke in December of 2013. Following major brain surgery and months of occupational and physical therapy, he's home from the hospital but his family are asking for donations to help modify his house so that he can lead a more active life.
Set a Google Alert on the phrase "we take security very seriously" and leaf through it every time you get hits. Often, if a popular website gets compromised, they'll post about it on their blog a couple of days before the e-mail announcement hits your inbox. It may not buy you a lot of time but two days is better than none at all.
If you're in the mad scramble to patch the Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL on your Ubuntu servers but you need to see some documentation, look in your /usr/share/doc/openssl/changelog.Debian.gz file. If you see the following at the very top of the file, you're patched:
Just last year around this time the company MC10 figured out how to fabricate small networks of sensors built out of flexible circuitry that stick to the skin of the wearer and collect biotelemetry. By sticking a single square of wavy, flexible circuitry someplace on your person you could keep a medical team appraised of certain aspects of your health. The tech curve, as always, moves like a roller coaster gone out of control... in the journal Nature Nanotechnology a research team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology improved upon the design and created flexible circuitry tattoos that can …
The human brain is a remarkably complex and flexible organ, with as many possible failure modes and glitches as there are emergent and surprising properties. Take something away, and sometimes you can coax another part of the brain to take up the slack in some other way. Case in point, artist Neil Harbisson. Harbisson was born with a condition called achromatopsia, which is the name for a group of disorders which collectively result in the same phenomenon - he cannot see colors, only shades of greyscale. Sometimes it's a neurological dysfunction, sometimes it's a defect in the retina, and sometimes it's …
